The generally continual rise in fitness awareness has led many millions of Americans to appreciate the benefits of exercise. Presently, there is a strong emphasis on muscular toning and cardiovascular conditioning along with injury prevention.
Rehabilitation has also been experiencing explosive growth quite parallel to the fitness, probably due to the awareness of the importance of health maintenance and injury prevention brought about by the fitness industry.
Rehabilitation, along with fitness, focuses on muscular toning and cardiovascular enhancement, but, in many musculoskeletal and neuromuscular dysfunctions, resulting from traumatic or overuse injury and disease, neuromuscular proprioceptive facilitation of awareness, control, and quality or level of finctional capacity and training is important to aid in the restorative process to impaired joints within the extremities, torso, head and neck.
Approximately ten years ago aquatic exercise for rehabilitation and fitness emerged until it is now the fastest growing sector within the fitness market, and is the latest development in rehabilitation. There has also been an explosive proliferation of aquatic exercise devices during the past decade.
There are numerous patents which pertain to an aquatic glove for swimming and/or aquatic exercise. U.S. Pat. No. 5,312,278 issued May 17, 1994, discloses a swimming glove which extends over the front-half portion of the forearm of the wearer.
An exercise glove is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 5,004,227 which allows for retaining a weight on a user's hand and comprises a support having a backhand portion with an insert pocket disposed on the backhand portion, for receiving the weight. A strap arrangement is mounted across the insert pocket for removably securing the weight within the insert pocket.
U.S. Pat. No. 4,923,418 allows for retaining a weight on a user's palmar surface.
There is also another, of many web glove designs with variations in functional intent, U.S. Pat. No. 4,892,496. This is a glove with an elongated finger portion intended to accommodate the little finger of a swimmer and the swimmer's distal elongated thumb portion. The purpose of this glove design is to allow one to maintain an outstretched hand while swimming.